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The idea behind this blog is to collect information on the death penalty in India and make it accessible. We are trying our best to put the latest information on the people who are currently on death row, the status of their cases, their mercy petitions and also the information on any death sentence across the country. Please feel free to write us and give us your suggestions and comments and also any information you have come across regarding the death penalty in India. Our email id is abolishdeathpenaltyindia@gmail.com The blog is currently managed by Grace Pelly, Lara Jesani, Nitu Sanadhya, Rebecca Gonsalvez, Reena Mary George and Vijay Hiremath.
Kindly mark copies of the emails to:
vijayhiremath@gmail.com
reena.mary.george@univie.ac.at

Friday, February 6, 2015

SC judgement on delay in execution of death sentences

NEW DELHI, September 2, 2014
In a few hours on Tuesday, a Five-Judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court will deliver judgment on whether inordinate delay in execution of death sentences amounts to, in effect, subjecting a death row convict to a double punishment of life imprisonment and death penalty.
Justices J. Chelameswar and Rohinton Nariman, who authors the verdict for the Bench led by Chief Justice of India R.M. Lodha, would also primarily address the question as to whether review of death penalty awarded in rarest of rare cases should continue to be done in the privacy of the judges’ chambers or transparently in open court, while affording the death row convict the last opportunity to fight for his life.
The judgment would be based on a batch of identical writ petitions filed by eight death row convicts, including three in the 2000 Dharmapuri bus burning case, Pakistani national Mohammed Arif alias Ashfaq in the Red Fort Attack case of 2000, 1993 Bombay serial blasts ‘mastermind’ Yakub Memon and B.A. Umesh and Sunder, both convicted in multiple murders.
The Dharmapuri case relates to the death of three students – Kokilavani, Gayathri and Hemalatha – of the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore, when the bus they were travelling in along with 44 other students and two teachers were torched by the three convicts — Nedunchezhian, Ravindran and Muniappan - on February 2, 2000, after the conviction of AIADMK leader Jayalalithaa in a criminal case.
Memon and Arif had argued in their separate petitions that years of anticipating their executions while confined in their respective jail cells has led them to suffer both mental torture. They contended that an execution now after a long term in prison would amount to serving them with both life sentence and death penalty.
The convicts' petitions have separately demanded that review petitions filed against death sentence should be heard in open court by a Bench comprising from three to five judges as the issue involves taking a person’s life.
They challenged the constitutional validity of the practice of judges being able to hear and dismiss review petitions by “circulation” — in judges’ chambers — rather than in open court with the convict allowed to make oral arguments.
“The convict must be left with no doubt in his mind that every possible opportunity was given to him under the Constitution of India before his life was taken away following the procedure established by law,” Memon had argued in his petition.
However, the judgment follows the implementation of the newly amended Supreme Court Rules 2013 from August 19. The amended rules provide that “every cause, appeal or other proceedings” in a death penalty case would be heard by a Bench of not less than three judges.
Death penalty matters were usually heard by Two-Judge Benches.
The 2013 Rules extend to pending death penalty-related cases also. It says any pending death sentence matters in which a Bench of less than three judges are of the opinion that the accused deserves death, the matter concerned will be referred to the Chief Justice of India, who will in turn constitute a Three-Judge Bench to hear it.
Source: http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/sc-judgement-on-delay-in-execution-of-death-sentences-today/article6372320.ece [last accessed 06.02.2015]

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The Death Penalty Scenario in India

The Indian government is committed to the retention of the death penalty. In December 2007 India was among the minority of countries who voted at the United Nations General Assembly against a moratorium on executions.

India retains the death penalty as punishment for a number of crimes including murder, kidnapping, terrorism, desertion, inducement to suicide of a minor or a mentally-retarded person and has more recently in 2013 come to include the offence of rape in certain circumstances. It is mandatory for second convictions for drug trafficking offences.

Death sentences are carried out by hanging. In 1983 the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of this method, stating that it: “involves no barbarity, torture or degradation.”

After observing an unofficial moratorium of 8 years in India, the Indian Government in November 2012 carried out the execution of Ajmal Kasab, convicted in the Mumbai attacks case, without public knowledge. This was followed by the secret execution of Afzal Guru, convicted in the Parliament attack case of 2001, in February 2013, under similar circumstances, without intimating his immediate family or affording a chance of judicial review. In both cases, the executions were carried out under covert operations conducted by the Government immediately upon rejection of their mercy petitions. Before these executions, the last execution to be carried out in India was that of Dhananjoy Chatterjee in 2004 who was convicted of rape and murder and which sentence was carried out after he had spent 13 years in solitary confinement.

Following this, several mercy petitions of death row convicts have come to be rejected. The fear of execution of such convicts is imminent. Bolstered by the Government's unapologetic conduct and public outcry, especially in recent cases of rape and murder reported in the country, the courts are continuing to hand down death sentences at an alarming rate.

There is very little information on the number of people sentenced to death in India. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, 1,455 convicts were awarded the death penalty during the period 2001-2011. The actual figure of sentences originally awarded is much higher considering the death sentences of 4,321 convicts came to be commuted to life imprisonment in the said period.

That the imposition of death penalty is ineffective in controlling crime rate or deterring crimes, is widely known and even accepted on the basis of exhaustive research and statistics. Inherently there are serious flaws in capital sentencing. DNA evidence is not used, death sentences can be given by a majority rather than a unanimous bench and many convictions for death sentences are based entirely on circumstantial evidence. This coupled with a faulty criminal law enforcement system and admittedly high corruption levels in the police force investigating the crime, increases the chances of false convictions. In such a scenario, the correctness of conviction resulting in the ultimate sentence of capital punishment relies on a system of trial and error.

Also, the handing over of the death penalty is dependent on various variable factors such as existing biases amongst law enforcers, social biases, media reports and public outcry, social and financial status of the accused, quality of legal representation and last but not the least, the bent of mind of the judges.

During the 1980s the Supreme Court sought to restrict the use of the death penalty by characterizing it as a punishment reserved only for the “rarest of the rare” cases. The doctrine has not had the desired effect. According to a former chief justice of the Delhi High Court, Rajindar Sachar: “after the rarest of rare doctrine was introduced in 1980, the Supreme Court confirmed death penalty in 40 per cent of cases in the period 1980-90 while it was 37.7 per cent between 1970 and 1980. For the high courts it rose from 59 per cent in 1970-80 to 65 per cent during 1980-90”. Over the past two decades the death penalty has been extended to include more crimes and been handed down with increasing frequency.

Paradoxically, whilst the “rarest of the rare” doctrine has been used to limit and restrict the use of the mandatory death penalty elsewhere in the world, it has often had the opposite effect in India. It has enabled judges to justify imposing sentences of death in an arbitrary manner, reinforcing the deeply flawed character of capital punishment in India today.

Recently in April 2013, in a petition filed by Devender Pal Singh Bhullar in the Supreme Court, delay in deciding his clemency plea was ruled out as a ground to commute his death sentence to life imprisonment. Devender Pal Singh Bhullar had approached the Supreme Court in 2011 after the President rejected his mercy petition after 8 years. The said judgment may have a far reaching effect on similar cases where mercy petitions have remained pending with the President for inordinate periods of time.